The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity 

Can we locate the seeds of a radical American feminist culture in the language of traditional gender roles in the American revolutionary era? 

This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.

On her wedding day in 1778—amid the throes of war in the young nation’s most rebellious city—Elizabeth Finney of Boston could not have imagined herself suing her husband, Thomas, for divorce. 

Four years later, as peace came to the United States, Elizabeth sought the same for her own life. In her petition for divorce, she insisted that from the moment of her vows, “she hath behaved & Demeaned herself as a faithfull & Dutyfull wife.” Yet Thomas, in her telling, “without any Provocation or Offence given, cruelly beat & abused” her, endangering her life. 

Women and men in the 18th century were bound by certain expectations of their gender, which was likewise contingent upon one’s race and class. Unequal but mutual duties prescribed specifically to husbands and wives were well understood by revolutionary-era Americans, these ideas populating the pages of books, newspapers and magazines.

Women were presumed to be subordinate to men: naturally helpless, emotional, vulnerable. As such, husbands were obligated to care for and protect their wives—financially, physically and emotionally. In part, conceptions of traditional 18th-century femininity derived from Christian tradition, but it was also codified in law (and grounded in the English common law), reflected in economic systems and accepted in social custom. It was deemed to be the purview of largely elite and middling white Americans. 

These expectations were so commonplace for white women, in fact, that they appeared in countless suits for divorce (like Finney’s) and petitions to 18th-century legislators throughout the revolutionary era. In these pleas to the state, white women wrote of their helplessness, their vulnerability, their inability to provide financially for themselves and their children. Amidst the chaos of war, their situations were dire: Many had lost husbands in battle, or their partners had absconded with the British. They sought remuneration, compensation and the return of spouses banished from the country for their political misdeeds. In many cases, their only outlet for redress was the petition—a tool of the nation’s most dependent and vulnerable.  

Reading through the thousands of petitions submitted by revolutionary-era women to the state, one might get the impression that all women accepted their subordinate status to men with humility and grace.

But what if they didn’t? What if their engagement with the discourse of feminine dependence was merely a shrewd tool, effectively deployed to cater to precisely what their readers—white, male elites—wanted to hear? What if the radical act of seeking a divorce in the 18th century contradicted the conservative language they employed? 

In most cases, we’ll never be able to deduce these women petitioners’ true feelings on their social and legal status. Many women petitioners in the revolutionary era left no trail for the historian to follow. 

What we can know is that the employment of this discourse of dependence, cunningly constructed in a sympathetic narrative neatly packaged for a patriarchal audience, was immensely effective. For the most part, women who engaged with these tropes of feminine subordination saw their petitions granted. Those that did not—including those who rebuked men—largely saw their pleas rejected or ignored. 

Although each petition conformed to contemporary expectations of traditional femininity as it was constructed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, each of these pleas was simultaneously subversive in one significant way: Women employed these tropes—particularly their submission, their inequality, and their need for protection—to make claims to the state. In so doing, however, they advocated for themselves in a public, political way, thus belying the very nature of their claims. Their language wasn’t necessarily radical, but their actions were. 

After identifying her husband’s myriad abuses, Elizabeth noted that Thomas had not only endangered her life, but “all that Comfort & hap[p]iness which she had a right to Expect in a State of Matrimony.” 

Elizabeth Finney expressly identified herself as an individual endowed with rights that the state ought to protect. The right itself was not new, but Elizabeth’s public claim of it was. 

The American Revolution, of course, did not bring about much substantial change in women’s lives. The elite, white men who framed the Constitution did not “remember the ladies,” as Abigail Adams urged her husband and his compatriots to do. Women did not foment a great rebellion, as she threatened they would in the same missive. Nevertheless, future generations of American women did learn important lessons from their predecessors.  

The first wave feminist movement of the 1840s emerged in advocacy for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Raised by revolutionary-era mothers and grandmothers who identified themselves as rights-bearing individuals, these antebellum activists sought to expand the very nature of rights by the mid-nineteenth century. 

Suffragists of the early 20th century and second wave feminists of the mid-20th century—including the founder of this magazine—likewise relied on this foundation laid by our revolutionary-era forebears. Those fighting the backlash against women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in the 21st century rely on this example still. The radical potential of the rhetoric of the rights of women is the throughline. 

Others, however, learned entirely different lessons from the founding generation. While some women sought meaningful progressive advances to American law and society, others fought to support the status quo. These activists paradoxically advocated for women’s fulfillment of traditional feminine comportment, all the while rejecting its premises through their actions. 

What if their engagement with the discourse of feminine dependence was merely a shrewd tool, effectively deployed to cater to precisely what their readers—white, male elites—wanted to hear? 

Catherine Beecher’s work is one example. Educated as a young woman in subjects usually reserved for men (Latin, mathematics, philosophy), Beecher nevertheless wrote publicly about the prescribed, natural and divinely ordained subordinate position of women. Responding to the increasing public abolitionist activism of some female contemporaries, Beecher insisted that if women wanted to influence politics, they ought to do so by coaxing their husbands, in the home.

Some of Beecher’s contemporaries advocated for the opposite. The Grimké sisters actively sought out and claimed public, political roles for themselves in the fight to end slavery and to extend the right to vote to women. Notably, neither Sarah nor Angelina Grimké enjoyed the benefit of the formal education Beecher received, largely because their father bought into assumptions about women’s subordination. Nevertheless, they argued that women’s roles as wives and mothers—in other words, their traditional femininity—was precisely what positioned them to be the ideal moral authority in political reform. Juxtaposing the rhetorical strategies of the Grimkés and Beecher, we can see how assumptions about white womanhood have been used to radically opposing ends. 

More than a century later, as part of a backlash movement against second-wave feminism, Phyllis Schlafly was the face of the STOP ERA movement in an effort to block the amendment from ratification. Quietly bolstered by the insurance industry and other economic interests that stood to lose billions if the ERA passed, Schlafly worked in direct opposition to second wave feminists while employing similar strategies of public speaking and organizing protests. Like Beecher, Schlafly forcefully argued that women’s most important position was as wives and mothers. All the while, however, Schlafly—who had earned a law degree and herself had run for Congress in the 1950s—enjoyed a very public, political career while championing the very opposite.  

More recently, Erika Kirk, the widow of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, has taken up a similar mantle. A Schlafly for our time, Kirk has given public speeches advocating for women to fulfill “traditional” gender roles—in other words, to focus on their positions as wives and mothers. Simultaneously, though, she has assumed her late husband’s leadership position at Turning Point USA and become a major power-player in the Republican Party.  

… They are calling for a return to a more oppressive patriarchal system than the one in which we already live: one which purports to protect women, but as our 18th-century female ancestors knew well, rarely lives up to those promises. 

As the nation prepares to commemorate its semiquincentennial, what should we make of the function of tropes of traditional femininity in American politics? What might our revolutionary ancestors think of the ways in which their rhetorical strategies have been mimicked by the likes of Beecher, Schlafly and Kirk, albeit to different ends? 

Eighteenth-century American women did what they could within the confines of a gendered hierarchy in which they were presumed to be helpless, irrational beings in need of protection from men. They employed the language of dependence to advocate for themselves when this protection failed to materialize. They managed to work within the limited options available to them at a time in which they were not considered full citizens and could not vote. 

Despite this, they begat a consciousness-raising of women as rights-bearing individuals on their intellectual descendants—a radical and necessary step for the birth of the American feminist movement.  

Two-hundred and fifty years later, however, publicly advocating for women’s subordinate role to men holds its own radical—and radically dangerous—potential. Whereas 18th-century women employed the stranglehold of gender ideology to wriggle themselves out of it, activists like Beecher, Schafly and Kirk have done the opposite. Those who continue to advocate for a return to “traditional” gender roles are instead asking us to return to that stranglehold—notably, while they themselves remain free of it in their public, political lives. What they are calling for is a return to a more oppressive patriarchal system than the one in which we already live: one which purports to protect women, but as our 18th-century female ancestors knew well, rarely lives up to those promises.  

They petitioned for more, for better, with the tools at their disposal. To honor those achievements, let us do the same. 

Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:

• The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
• America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
• Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
• ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
• Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
• Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
• The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
• Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
• She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
• Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
• The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
• The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University